In Japanese, 女 (female) and 男 (male) are opposites. The inconsistent naming of the two in HanziHero implies that they are not two sides of the same concept. Is this the case? If not, would it make more sense to equivocate them (male/female or man/woman)?
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The slight difference here can be explained best etymologically. As the Outlier Linguistics dictionary states:
女 depicts a literal woman, hence the meaning “woman”. 男 on the other hand depicts a field (田) and a plow (力),
男 consists of field (田) and plow (力). In ancient China, plowing the fields was considered man’s work, so field + plow is used to represent the original meaning “man; male.”
In this sense, we can see that 女 depicts a literal “woman”, while 男 hints at the abstract idea of “male”. However, these are merely the primary meanings, and male/man and female/woman should be accepted for both respective characters.
Currently 男 already accepts “male” and “man” as answers. I’ll update 女 to accept “female” in addition to “woman” as an answer as well.
Hope that helps! As always, thanks for the feedback.
(Note that we teach 力 as “muscular arm” to differentiate it from 耒 “plow”. HanziHero sometimes takes slight creative license with component names for the sake of mnemonics. In most cases, the etymologically-precise component breakdown of a character is not as useful as it is here. Our priority is helping people reach a basic level of character fluency, not teaching the etymology of characters which many native speakers are not familiar with anyway.)
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Thank you as always for the great explanation kevin!
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Personally I have the Zhongwen plugin running (it translates when you mouse over a hanzi) and just type in the other meanings that I think the card needs when a new card appears.
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